General

What's shocking about this idea?

Nothing.  We've had a decade of people proposing to garden every sun-facing surface in the city, ideas I often support.  So it would be astonishing if doing it to bus roofs had not been proposed.  

What's astonishing is that when Marco Castro Cosio proposed it, calling it Bus Roots”, the result was this:

[Marco Castro] Cosio's “Bus Roots” idea has garnered loads of praise, earning the runner-up spot in Designwala's 2010 urban-design competition and landing in 2011's Festival of Ideas for the New City, an event in NYC meant to “harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore the ideas destined to shape it.”

Publications and websites from France, Japan, Canada, Germany and elsewhere have similarly swallowed Bus Roots uncritically, publishing Photoshopped images from Cosio's thesis that suggest these buses could be out there right now, carrying passengers. The most recent offender is Wake Up World, which ran with this Feb. 27 headline: “Gardens Flourish on Top of City Busses.” Three problems: “Gardens” should be singular, because there's only one garden, a small prototype atop the BioBus that's growing sedum. “Flourish” is much too enthusiastic a verb for what the sedum is doing; the ornamental stonecrop basically sits there at ankle height doing nothing. …"

You can find other misleading stories here, here and here.

That's from today's Atlantic story by John Metalfe.  And "misleading" is right, becuase this idea has serious problems of physics, which Metcalfe patiently explains.  How much more fossil fuel do you want to burn (and greenhouse gases do you want to emit) to haul hundreds of water-heavy gardens around your city, all located so that most people will never see them?

It would be nice to imagine a day when you can't win urban design prizes for things that are physically or geometrically impossible.  Violations of the laws of physics often look inspiring.  That's why we have the image of heaven as built on clouds, an idea that continues through many imagined cloud cities and shows up as Avatar's airborne land formations.  Those formations may deserve a film design prize, but if you called them landscape or urban design, some check against the facts of physics would be in order. 

But there's a also a humanistic problem issue with gardening the bus roof.  Like bus wraps, it implies that public transit design shouldn't be about public transit customers.  Riders, like most of the public, would never enjoy Cosio's roof, but they would certain experience the sensation of heaviness that comes from being under all that weight. 

As Metcalfe points out, there's actually a lot of important stuff on a bus roof, but there's also a question of who the design should be serving.  I would like to see much more transparency in vehicles, extending to the roof as you see on tourbuses, so that we can break down this sense that the bus is box in which you must be stored for transportation.  My goal is that you should be able to be on a bus while also still being on the street, engaged with the whole urban environment.  For more on that, see Chapter 15 of Human Transit. 

Hat Tip: Michael Setty 

Just a few paragraphs at the end of an excellent article by Brian Wheeler.

Infrastructure USA, a national blog of repute, interviewed me last week, and rendered the result as a series of clips, here.

I'm now set up in North America as a consulting practice, Jarrett Walker and Associates.  (I'm still an Principal Consultant of MRCagney for work in Australia and New Zealand.)

My consulting website, jarrettwalker.com, is not as flashy as most, but I hope it gives a sense of the ways I can help governments, advocates, and other city-builders to make good decisions about transit, and to bring it into harmony with everything they do.  Have a look! 

The City Builder's Book Club is about to begin reading Jane Jacobs's seminal 1961 book, the Death and Life of Great American Cities.   

This is one of the few books that Absolutely Everyone Who Thinks About Cities Has Read, so if you haven't read it, (a) don't tell anyone, not even your partner or priest or dog, and (b) take this opportunity to read the book as commentary and discussion appears on the Book Club Blog, chapter by chapter. I'll be providing the opening commentary on Chapter 18, the main chapter on transportation.

Yes, I know, you lazy students can also just read the blog and forget reading the book (much as journalists prefer to interview me rather than read my book!) but believe me, you'll be the poorer for it.  Jacobs is one of the most readable writers ever on city planning, and even those who disagree her tend to acknowledge her brilliance as an observer of city life.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.com attacks me this morning for this post, in which I argued that redundancy in transit networks (as hailed by the Economist in their discussion of my book) often comes at the expense of overall service quantity and thus your ability to get where you're going:

… Walker speaks up on his blog, to explain that when he talks about reliability, he doesn’t mean you should actually let people provide a variety of approaches for taking customers where they want to go: 

"Massive redundancy" may be fine if you're a megacity, though even there, its effectiveness may be a feature of the peak that doesn't translate to the rest of the day.  Anywhere else, services need to work together as a network.  Even in London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Berlin, that's really what's happening. 

This is what happens when your mind is full of smart networks and transit-oriented growth. The proper word here is not “redundancy” but “competition.” To the owner of a taxi medallion or a member of the Transport Workers Union, minibuses, gypsy cabs, rolling chairs and pedicabs are all redundant, because you’re already providing all the service a customer could legitimately need. If some abuelita is stuck in the rain for 45 minutes waiting to make one of your smart connections, well, that just shows you need more money so the system can be more efficiently planned. 

Note the use of "competition" not as an idea but just as a mantra.  This last paragraph is so incoherent that I'm not even sure what I'm being accused of, so let me just clarify the question of competition.

The problem with encouraging multiple transit products to compete for the customer along the same path of travel is that transit's usefulness lies heavily in frequency (thus preventing 45 minute connections, for example), and frequency is an expensive resource that must be concentrated so that it can be made abundant.  To introduce competition among transit services going the same way is to undermine frequency — as in the increasingly discredited British model where people were required to let Joe's Red Bus go by because their ticket was good only on Jim's Blue Bus.   Earth to competition fantasists: Outside of the peak commute, people just want to get where they're going now, but they want this throughout the day, which means they want frequency.  Abundant frequency arises from concentrating and organizing a single pattern of service, not encouraging lots of different services to run on top of each other.

I have never opposed private sector competition.  There's obviously nothing wrong with taxis, pedicabs, etc competing with each other, and even competing with transit.  On the peak commute, transit is usually overcrowded and can benefit from others taking up some of the load (because peak transit service is so expensive).  But outside the peak commute, where frequency matters, nothing can compete with transit at its price point, once it's built up sufficient frequency.  Taxis and pedicabs and autorickshaws can still have a role (a) at other price-points and (b) in places where the geography prevents transit from offering attractive service.

Still, we need to be more critical of cases where we are spending public transit dollars on multiple services that compete with each other instead of adding up to the greatest possible mobility.  Competition fantasists imagine that when Joe's Red Bus and Jim's Blue Bus run on the same route, the customer is being empowered.  Actually, she's just being obstructed, because in most cases, what she wants is any bus, now.

“[Seattle's] snow and ice response plan is built around getting people to use public transportation.  Given our geography here, we would have to have 100 trucks [to cover the whole city], and at $150,000 to $200,000 a truck, that would be a foolish waste of money because they would sit most of the time. And they would sit for five years because it doesn’t snow that often. So we go with what we have.”

 – Seattle Director of Street Maintenance Steve Pratt

That's from a terrific (and funny) Atlantic article on snow removal, by Emily Badger.  (Seattle has only 30 snowplows in a city that passes some winters with no snow at all, and averages only 7 inches of snow per year.  It also has a traumatic memory of serious blizzards in 2008 and 2010, which I believe caused the coinage of the now-banal term snowpocalypse.)

Today at Slate.com, Tom Vanderbilt, author of How We Drive, reviews my book Human Transit.  It's a friendly review and I much appreciate it.  Followup thoughts on the review in a day or two.  Meanwhile, for the record, I do believe in pleasure!  

I doubt Sydney's notorious talk-radio host Alan Jones would have asked me such polite questions, but he was away that day.  Here's the interview of me on Sydney's 2GB drive-time, by Andrew Moore.  Download MP3.

Much of transit's complexity arises from the difficulty of saying and remembering when it runs.  Route maps can be made pretty simple, but most urban North Americans (and Australians) have been taught that schedules are intrinsically complicated.  You either bypass them using trip planners or realtime information, or learn to enjoy wading through vast tables of times glittering with footnotes ("deviates via Hilltop Community Center on Thursdays").

Schedules are intrinsically complicated if running times change throughout the day, as is the case in many transit services that are stuck in mixed traffic.  But when you have an exclusive right of way, like a busway or separated train track, and you want the network to be simple, you can achieve beautiful repeating patterns like, well, this … (click to sharpen)

It's a slice of this new diagram of the entire Swiss railway network, showing the repeating hourly patterns on which the entire network runs.   [Download PDF]    The notation takes a while to figure out, but there's a legend in English, French, and German that will talk you through it with typical Swiss clarity.  But for example, suppose you're at Grenchen Süd on the left side of the image, and you take an eastbound local train (the black line that runs across the middle of the image).  It arrives Grenchen Sud at :30 after every hour departs a minute later.  You'll then stop at Solothurn West at :42 after the hour and arrive Solothurn at :44.  Stay on the train and you'll get to Niederbipp, but if you want to go to Wiedlisbach, on the local line north out of Solothurn, you'll have a nice connection.  That train leaves at :48, only four minutes after you arrive.

This regular pattern happens every hour, all day, every day, and similar patterns cover the entire country.  The whole rail network is an interconnected structure of times, not just lines, with schedules built around each other to optimize connections as much as possible.  The core enabling idea is the regular hourly pattern of almost everything. That's what assures that (a) you can remember the schedule and use it regardless of when you decide to travel and (b) the connection timing is the same regardless of which trip you're on.

Download the full map if you dare.  The legend itself is a work of art.  I stared at it happily for half an hour, but I'm a fallen geek.  A true geek could kill an afternoon.  

And of course, the Swiss do the same thing at the urban transit scale.   Here you can download a similar map for the Zurich S-Bahn. (Legend only in German, but it's similar to the main map, which has English.)

No, I'm not saying that all public information should look like this, only that regular patterns in a timetable are a radical act of simplification, one that suddenly makes the whole day's service graspable in a couple of numbers.  Where these regular patterns are possible, they're worth fighting for.